


The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

by irena_adler



Series: Watson [95]
Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Gun Violence, M/M, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 02:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8826667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irena_adler/pseuds/irena_adler
Summary: Ian is hunting a fugitive when things go terribly wrong.
(Takes place three weeks after Two Loners Together)





	

**Title:** The Hunter Becomes the Hunted  
 **Characters:**

Ian (/OC (Jason/[picture](http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i182/irena_adler/LJ/pomortzeff060900011.jpg)))  
**Rating:** FRMA, R  
**Summary:** Ian is hunting a fugitive when things go terribly wrong.  
**Placement:** Lt. Col. Jason C. Hill is introduced in the story, [How Edgerton Became Number Four](http://irena-adler.livejournal.com/98878.html). Jason was the sniper who had been ranked right above Ian, but Ian rattled him enough with sexual innuendo at his testing enough that he dropped a ranking. Ian later made up for it in bed.  Jason is very much in the closet and deeply conflicted about acting on his long suppressed homosexual desires.  
This story comes three weeks after they met.  
****Word Count:**** 3696  
 ** **Disclaimer:**** Not my characters (except when they are), not my world, making no money.  
 ** **Beta:[](http://fredbasset.livejournal.com/profile)[ **fredbasset**](http://fredbasset.livejournal.com/)   ****Thank you!    
**Note:** This was written for [Round of Kink](http://rounds-of-kink.livejournal.com/) with the prompt - "A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts." [Axel Munthe] Kink: Toughness (machismo or hyper-masculinity; physical stamina; a hard surface covering an inner softie; resolve; survival skills; teeth-gritting acts such as pulling an arrow out of one's own thigh, etc; see also Rough behavior; Bad boys, etc); journeys (odysseys and quests; time-travel; being lost and trying to get home; road trips; pioneering and exploration, including space travel); violent feelings (hatred; murderous rage; need for revenge)"  
This is also written for Fred, who asked for more Ian/Jason (Ask and ye shall receive!)  
  
  
  


**The Hunter Becomes the Hunted -**

Ian hadn't heard the bullets that slammed into him. 

That shocked him more than the stabbing pain, the sudden drop to the ground and roll, the throbbing utter certainty that he was about to die. Somehow the man he was chasing had circled around and gotten the jump on him. No one had gotten the jump on him for years. 

Ian stayed where he stopped rolling. He breathed shallowly, ignoring the sticks that poked his ribs, the heavy smell of white tail deer scat in his nose. Hughes had to have shot him from quite a distance away and Ian had fallen into a narrow ravine. There was the slight chance that Hughes hadn't seen where he'd dropped. He pressed his bullet-laced shoulder into the mud to stem the bleeding… 

And listened. 

His own breath, heartbeat, he acknowledged and dismissed. The quiet northwesterly wind through the douglas fir and lodgepole pine trees. The rustle of beetles and forest scavengers. The distant hum of flies. 

No sound of Hughes. Ian shifted carefully to a more permanent position, pulling his rifle out from underneath him and laying it by his side. His shoulder screamed in agony but he hardly noticed it. Adrenaline was in control of him, heightening his senses and dampening the pain. 

Soon the adrenaline would fade and he would be in deep trouble. He was going to die here in the appropriately named River of No Return Wilderness Area in central Idaho. Hughes had gone to ground here two years ago, in over two million acres of largely undeveloped wilderness. Ian had been tracking him for four days and had finally spotted him today. No one else had been able to find Hughes and survive, but Ian had arrogantly thought that he could do the job. His arrogance would finally catch up with him, just like many people all his life had always warned him. 

His mind shied away from thoughts of his family. He didn't want his last thoughts in life to be wasted on them. 

Instead, he thought about Charlie Eppes and how he might get out of this situation. No doubt it would involve graphs and numbers and a lot of excited hand-waving. Charlie would probably know how to make use of the GPS-enabled sat phone clipped to Ian's belt to somehow triangulate Hughes's location. Ian wished he had a little voodoo at the moment. 

Maybe even more than Charlie, Ian wished he had Don Eppes at his side. The agent was cool under pressure, capable, and didn't give him the macho attitude so many agents did. With Don, Ian could make it out of here and maybe even take Hughes down on the way. 

David Sinclair wasn't bad, though he wasn't as smart and fast-thinking as Don. Megan Reeves would probably be able to talk Hughes into giving himself up. 

Hey, at the moment, Ian would even take the meathead, Colby Granger. He knew from Colby's record that he had to be smarter and more capable than he pretended to be. 

Ian sighed and pushed his burning shoulder farther into the mud. There was really only one person he wanted to be at his side at the moment and it was stupid and irrational and it bugged the hell out of him. 

Lt. Col. Jason C. Hill. 

Ian twitched his right leg as he felt something crawl up it. There was still no sound of approaching footsteps. Maybe Hughes was waiting and hiding out to see if there was more than one person after him. It's what Ian would do. And in this case, it was a particularly effective ploy, since by waiting, Hughes could just let Ian bleed and go into shock before he came to finish him off. He knew that Hughes could be patient - he had methodically killed eight people over the course of eleven years before anyone figured out the accidents were actually the work of one hitman. Hughes was good, but Ian should have been better. 

Lt. Col. Jason C. Hill wouldn't have let Hughes get the drop on him. 

Ian and Jason had only met once, three weeks ago, and Ian had no actual evidence of what Jason would be like in the field. It was just the instinctive sizing up of a person, a skill that had served him well all his life. It only took a few minutes of talk before Ian had known that Jason would be an excellent stalker and tracker, not just a good shot. There was a watchfulness, an awareness about him that Ian had only seen before in the mirror. They'd clicked immediately. 

Ian had met Jason at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos. They'd both gone there for sniper recertification, and to test their spot on the unofficial official sniper rankings. Ian had gone there to see the man who was ahead of him in the rankings and gotten so much more. Ian had taken Jason's ranking, and shortly thereafter taken his virginity. For three whole days, two loners had shared a hotel room and everything else. Then they'd parted ways, with no expectation that they'd ever see each other again. Jason was deeply conflicted about giving in to the homosexual desires that he had resisted for his whole life and Ian knew that meeting him again was just selfishness. He'd vowed to never contact Jason. 

God, he wished that Jason were here now. 

Ian shivered and realized that the bullet wounds must be worse than he'd thought. His pulse was rapid and his breathing was shallow. Even his preoccupation with who he wanted to be at his side was a sign that he was going into shock. He may not have the luxury of hiding from Hughes. There was no point in using his sat phone. Help wouldn't be able to find him for days. 

He didn't want to get up. He wanted to close his eyes and drift off to sleep. Either Hughes would get him or the shock would, but it would be quiet and painless. Lying down was making his shoulder wound bleed more heavily and soon he would be deep into shock. He railed at himself, saying he'd never taken the easy route in his life, that it would be a pathetic end to his career to die here, that his body would probably never be found which would haunt his friends. None of those arguments even got Ian to stir a finger. 

He finally let himself turn to the one argument that seemed to have any resonance these days - if he didn't get up and move, there was no possibility that he'd ever see Jason again. 

He never _would_ see him again, but if Ian wasn't alive, then there wasn't even the possibility that they could somehow run across each other. The chance that he would again look into those young-old eyes, that he would feel that strong body against his, that they would drive each other to completion then drop into the peaceful, perfect silence on the other side. 

Ian listened carefully then pushed himself up with one hand from the ground. He couldn't fully suppress the grunt of pain as his wounded shoulder screamed in protest as it came out of the mud. He crouched in position and looked around. There wasn't any obvious sign of movement, but the forest wasn't unusually still or quiet, which would signal an invader moving through. 

He scooped up a handful of the mud and packed it against his bullet wounds. Though his sleeve was soaked in blood, the bleeding seemed to have slowed with the mud. His injured arm was useless and limp, but he'd trained himself to shoot with either hand. 

He was in a narrow ravine, the undergrowth showing where he'd slid after he fell. Gripping his rifle with his good hand, he slowly crawled back to the point where he'd been shot. He had to set down his rifle again before he could use his one hand to grab onto the rough trunk of a lodgepole pine. He pulled himself up and examined the landscape. If he were Hughes, where would he have his sniper nest? Fortunately, there was really only one good place within shooting distance, unless Hughes had a much higher-powered rifle than anyone expected. Hughes had been a sniper in the Army before he was discovered so he'd choose the best spot. 

Ian wondered if Jason and Hughes had every crossed paths in the Army sniper community. Would Jason have suspected that Hughes was a murderer? Hughes's targets had all been hired hits of military personnel, so in theory…. 

Ian yanked his attention back to the present. Was that a flash of something large to the southwest? He held himself still, pressed up against the tree, and watched. The flash had been in the opposite direction of where Ian had thought Hughes had shot from. It was extremely unlikely that there'd be another person nearby in this remote wilderness, but it could have been a black bear, moose, or just his imagination. The shock could be giving him hallucinations. 

He gritted his teeth. Now was no time to doubt his hard-won instincts. Something or someone was coming from the southwest. Perhaps Hughes was circling around to the spot where he saw Ian fall. Ian knew Hughes was cautious and methodical. There had been one other FBI agent and two bounty hunters that had disappeared in this wilderness when they went after Hughes. Two Army trackers had been also injured in a landslide that was too coincidental. Once again Ian was annoyed by his own arrogance in coming here alone when so many before him had failed, even in a group. He'd just been feeling very unsettled lately and had taken on the most impossible, dangerous case he could find. He'd been distracted since a certain weekend spent in a certain sniper's arms… 

A flash, definitely. It was human and making its way in Ian's direction. He tightened his grip on the pine and willed himself to invisibility. He couldn't both hold himself upright and shoot. 

The person went below a hill and Ian shoved himself into stumbling motion. Holding his rifle, his head spinning, he staggered as fast as he could go towards a clump of pines. He reached the pines and drove his body in between them, the needles tearing at his clothing and skin. He froze, heart pounding, as he waited for silence again. 

The forest seemed to settle again after his frantic motion. He was wedged in painfully between the pines but it kept him upright. He pulled his rifle up and braced it on a branch. Swallowing hard, he focused on getting his breathing calmed down and his hands steady. 

Hughes came over a rise, much closer than Ian had expected. Ian didn't have time or space to swap his rifle for his handgun. 

The man had long ratty hair and a thick beard and was much skinner than his photos, but it was definitely Hughes. His rifle was raised and ready. He was carrying an M24A2 Remington sniper rifle, an improvement on the usual Army sniper M24. Ian was surprised that Hughes had an upgraded rifle, considering how long Hughes had been off the grid. He must have outside help. 

All of these thoughts came in an instant. 

He tightened his functional hand on the rifle and did what he had to do - he called out, "Federal Agents! Stop!" 

Hughes didn't hesitate. 

His rifle centered on Ian's hiding spot. 

Bullets chewed into the trees, spraying the Ian's face with bark. 

Ian's first shot went wide as the trees bracing his rifle shook. He dragged the muzzle back towards the target but didn't fire. He continued to count off the shots left in Hughes's five-shot magazine. Another bullet struck the tree next to him. 

Two bullets left. 

A sharp pain in the side of Ian's neck. 

One bullet left. 

A thud into the tree partially blocking Ian's face. 

Hughes's gun clicked. It had a second magazine jungle-clipped to the first. It would take him about five seconds to swap it over. 

Ian waited four seconds for the tree branch that braced his rifle to stop moving. 

Then he shot Hughes through the heart. 

He shot a second time as Hughes fell, punching a hole in his right cheek. 

Ian waited, catching his breath, but Hughes didn't move. 

He waited another long moment, until the shocking sound of gunfire left the air and the usual natural noises returned. He slowly dragged himself out of the clump of trees, barely feeling the additional scrapes and snags. He limped over to Hughes and prodded him with his foot. 

Hughes was unquestionably dead. 

Ian nodded to himself. He didn't feel triumphant. He never did, right afterwards. 

Setting aside his rifle, he pulled out his cellphone. It didn't have a signal, but it had a camera. He took pictures of the body, the surrounding area, the trees with the bullet holes, then he turned the camera on himself and took photos of his wounds, dirt and all. He had a gouge in the right side of his neck, soaking his shirt along the collar and shoulder to match the blood caking his left arm. 

Ian took out a knife and sliced off two sections of Hughes's pant leg. The clothing was cleaner and less worn than he would have guessed. Hughes definitely had had help. Ian folded up a square of cloth and pressed it against the neck wound then held it with his shoulder while he wrapped it in place with the other strip of cloth. He took another picture of the body with the sliced-off pant leg, so it wouldn't confuse the recovery team. 

He looked around for a moment. Was it possible that Hughes had someone else nearby? He really doubted that a second person would have been missed by Ian while he was trailing Hughes, but it was possible. He was that off his game lately. 

He waited, then shrugged. If someone came after him now, there was little he could do about it. He searched around for more mud then packed it against his shoulder wound. He could wrap it with fabric like his neck but it seemed like the bleeding had stopped. He got the water bottle from Hughes's belt and took a long, deep drink of it. He'd been short on water for the last day, and hadn't been able to look around for it while on Hughes's trail. 

He pulled the sat phone from his belt and turned it on. After this long in the wilderness, the sat phone was low battery, so he texted his boss instead of calling her. It was awkward, with only one dirty, blood-slick hand, but he managed. 

He texted, _Hughes KIA._ He found the GPS coordinates on the phone for the location and sent them as well, then waited. 

Telling his boss that Hughes was Killed In Action meant that he had proof that it was self-defense and his boss wouldn't have to justify him killing someone who - though an ex-Army multi-murderer - was officially a civilian. Ian knew that many people hoped Hughes could be taken alive. Some of the people who had hired him to kill military personnel were still unknown. However, Ian didn't think that even bringing a whole battalion here would have brought Hughes in alive. Ian had seen his face. He was a man willing to die before being interrogated. 

Ian could respect that. 

His sat phone buzzed with _Good job. Are u hurt?_

_Wounded. Can walk._

_Sending recov. Can u wait w body?_

Ian shook his head. She wanted him to stay with the body, preserve the scene, and get debriefed on site by the recovery team, but that could take days with as deep as he was in the wilderness. While the wounds he received weren't life-threatening at the moment, they would be if he waited. 

He sent, _Cant stay_

That would tell her that he was seriously injured and needed medical attention. 

_OK. Need evac?_

He looked at the phone for a moment. He knew if he said the word, that his boss would move heaven and earth to get him out of here in a few hours. It was tempting but a perverse sense of pride wouldn't allow him. He shouldn't have let Hughes get the jump on him in the first place. 

_Ill walk_

There was a pause, and Ian could almost hear his boss arguing with herself over whether she should press for more details or insist on an evacuation. Finally, she texted, _OK. See u soon_

Ian put the sat phone away. He took a second canteen and a pair of MREs off of Hughes's body. He then spent the next few minutes, using time and energy he didn't have to spare, covering the body with branches and rocks to protect it from scavengers. He wanted to make sure the recovery team was able to verify his kill. He took more pictures of the covered body. 

He swallowed some more water then hooked the canteen to his belt. It clanked against the sat phone. He pulled it up and stared at it thoughtfully. 

He knew Jason's phone number, though he'd never called it. He could use the last bit of the sat phone battery to call him. 

But what would he say? 

'I almost died but I can't stop thinking about you? I almost died _because_ I can't stop thinking about you?' 

What could Jason possibly say to that? He didn't even know what he wanted Jason to say. It wasn't even necessarily true. Hughes was very good and Ian was alone. Most likely Hughes would have gotten the jump on him even if Ian hadn't been distracted. He couldn't blame it on Jason that he'd almost died. 

Ian had sworn to himself that he would never contact Jason and cause him more pain. Jason's problems with his sexuality were obviously deep and complex and Ian would only be pouring salt on the wounds. When they'd separated, Ian had been sad but determined that he'd never see him again. Yet here he was, contemplating calling Jason only three weeks later. 

Was his own desire enough to force Jason to face his homophobic demons? Did he have the right to damage someone else's life for his own selfishness? The answer was a resounding 'no.' But here he was, contemplating it. 

He powered off the sat phone, turned away from Hughes's corpse and began the long walk out of the wilderness. 

He needed time to think. 

 

Twenty-six hours after he killed Hughes, Ian staggered into the parking lot of a ranger station. It wasn't the ranger station that he expected, but that didn't surprise him. He'd gotten turned around more than once, the innate tracking sense he relied on deserting him as he grew more and more tired. He thought about stopping to rest many times, but he wasn't sure he'd get up again. He'd long ago run out of water and food. The numbness had vanished from his shoulder wound and it now screamed in pain every step he took. At least the mud bandage had held and he hadn't lost any more blood that way. The cloth pressed to his neck, however, was soaked in blood. 

Many times he'd thought that he should power on his sat phone, text his boss that he did need an evacuation after all. But every time he'd reached for the phone, he'd thought that he would be using up the last of the battery. Even though he'd sworn he wouldn't call Jason, he'd wanted to be able to. So he'd walked on. 

He stumbled to the door of the ranger station, shocking the woman who stood there. He knew the picture he must make - bloody, covered in mud, with a rifle over his shoulder. 

As she was reaching for her sidearm, he fumbled at his waist and came up with a badge. 

"FBI," he said hoarsely. 

"Oh!" she said, her eyes still wide. "You must be Agent Edgerton! We're supposed to be on the lookout for you!" 

"Okay," Ian said, a smile making its way from somewhere deep inside. "Then 'look out.'" 

She stared at him for another second before grabbing for her phone. Ian pushed past her and slowly sank into a chair. He closed his eyes and listened to her surprisingly coherent report on his arrival. 

"Agent Edgerton? Agent Edgerton?" 

Ian realized that she must have been saying his name several times. He made a noise that might have been a reply. 

"I'm to drive you down to headquarters where an ambulance will meet us." 

"Don' need am'blance," Ian mumbled. 

She chuckled. "I was told to take you by force, if necessary." 

He opened one eye and looked at her. Now that she'd gotten over her initial surprise, she seemed more than capable of forcing him into a ranger's truck. 

"'kay," he said. 

She handed him some water which he chugged down then led the way out to the truck. 

When Ian paused, she said, "Don't worry about getting it dirty. You aren't nearly as messy as a dying moose." 

Ian nodded tiredly, pulled off his rifle and climbed into the truck. He shifted his gear around so he could sit with the least amount of pain. He felt his cellphone in his pocket and pulled it out. To his surprise, it had a small sliver of signal. 

He looked at it for a long moment. 

He thought about the last three weeks of uncertainty and distraction. 

He thought about the last twenty-six hours of circular, unsettled thoughts. 

He thought of all the reasons that he should leave Jason alone, bury himself in work, find another fugitive that needed to be tracked down in another remote wilderness. Keep going until the next shots that he didn't hear finally killed him. 

Then he texted Jason. _Its Ian. I need to see you._

In less than thirty seconds, he got a reply. 

_Thank God. Name the place._

  



End file.
